Theater of War

Nothing will be the same after September 11th. This is the wisdom, offered and widely received since the announcement of the war on terrorism: a permanent war declared on both an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. But in Theater of War, Lewis Lapham shows with customary intelligence and wit that the recent imperial behavior of the United States government is

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Overview

Nothing will be the same after September 11th. This is the wisdom, offered and widely received since the announcement of the war on terrorism: a permanent war declared on both an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. But in Theater of War, Lewis Lapham shows with customary intelligence and wit that the recent imperial behavior of the United States government is perfectly consistent with the practice of past administrations. Finding skeptics in the battle against evil has been a rare achievement. For example, as Lapham points out: "Ted Koppel struck the preferred note of caution on November 2 when introducing the Nightline audience to critics of the American bombing of Afghanistan: 'Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen.'" Unpopular opinions seldom make an appearance on the network news, and during the months since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the voices of dissent have been few and far between. Lewis Lapham is an exception. Almost alone among mainstream political commentators, he has had the courage to question the motive and feasibility, as well as the imperial pretension, of the Bush administration's infinite crusade against the world's evildoers.

Editorial Reviews

Eric Wargo

At the party's 2000 convention, the Republican National Committee's finance chairman explained to a group of complaining midrange donors, "You pay a little more, you get a little more." For Harper's editor Lapham, this phrase stands as a nutshell definition of American politics. In his latest attack against American plutocracy, the author compares the country to imperial Rome in its decline, arguing that the "lopsided division of the country" into "the hapless many and the privileged few" has generated a kind of national low self-esteem visible in our neglected infrastructure and empty political discourse. "The view from the box seats holds that the embarrassments of death and failure will fall to the lot of persons to whom one has never been properly introduced," the author writes. Against this attitudewhich arguably made September 11 inevitableLapham exhorts us, with characteristic eloquence, to re-create a democracy worth fighting for.

At the party's 2000 convention, the Republican National Committee's finance chairman explained to a group of complaining midrange donors, "You pay a little more, you get a little more." For Harper's editor Lapham, this phrase stands as a nutshell definition of American politics. In his latest attack against American plutocracy, the author compares the country to imperial Rome in its decline, arguing that the "lopsided division of the country" into "the hapless many and the privileged few" has generated a kind of national low self-esteem visible in our neglected infrastructure and empty political discourse. "The view from the box seats holds that the embarrassments of death and failure will fall to the lot of persons to whom one has never been properly introduced," the author writes. Against this attitude—which arguably made September 11 inevitable—Lapham exhorts us, with characteristic eloquence, to re-create a democracy worth fighting for. Author—Eric Wargo

Publishers Weekly

Harper's magazine editor Lapham (Money and Class in America) comes out doing the sarcastic equivalent of swinging in this collection of diatribes against incompetent hypocrisy in the media and government: "Maybe it's a trick of memory or a sign of age, but when I watch President George W. Bush threaten a White House television camera with a promise to punish the world's evildoers, the call to arms sounds like the sale pitch for an off-road vehicle or a lite beer," he writes in one of 14 jeremiads, published in his Harper's "Notebook" column between October 2000 and March 2002. Unfortunately, just as the above quote provides a double dose of self-doubt at the beginning and nowhere near enough wallop at the finish, most of these pieces, including an introductory tour of the last 50 years of U.S. foreign policy and small wars, lack laser-guided punch. At his best, however, Lapham summarizes and asserts his version of fin de siecle politics. Some of his post-September 11 remarks hit home, e.g., when he cites Alfred North Whitehead in arguing that the business of the future is to be dangerous. He wisely observes that "all societies, like most individuals, are always in some kind of trouble" and acutely concludes that it isn't trouble that kills, but rather "the fear of thought and the paralysis that accompanies the wish to believe that only the wicked perish." But such moments are difficult to pick out of the often diffuse text, and while criticism of the president has been somewhat muted, readers sympathetic to Lapham's point of view will wish he had gone even further out on a rhetorical limb. (Sept. 30) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Read an Excerpt

American Jihad

War is
the health of the state.

--Randolph Bourne

Fascism
should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and
corporate power.

--Benito Mussolini

Three months ago I thought we'd
been given a chance for a conversation about the future of the American
political idea, the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center providing
an impressive occasion for timely remarks on the topics of our foreign and
domestic policy as well as an opportunity to ask what we mean by the phrases
``public service,'' ``common good,'' ``civic interest.'' The newspapers were
reporting daily proofs of selfless citizenship, not only on the part of the
volunteers clearing the wreckage in lower Manhattan but also on the part of
people everywhere else in the country giving of their money and effort to
whatever need was nearest at hand, and I expected something of the same
public-spiritedness to find a voice in the Congress, in the major news media,
possibly on the television talk shows. Informed argument about why and how
America had come to be perceived as a dissolute empire; instructive doubts cast
on the supposed omniscience of the global capital markets; sustained questioning
of the way in which we divide the country's wealth; a distinction drawn between
the ambitions of the American national security state and the collective
well-being of the American citizenry.

By December I knew that I'd been
barking at the moon. The conversation maybe had a chance of taking place in
magazines of small circulation, or possibly somewhere in the distant reaches of
C-SPAN (at two a.m., on the stage of a college auditorium in Wabash, Indiana),
but not in the chambers of Congress, not under the circus tents of the big-time
news and entertainment media, not, except by special permission and then only
with a word of apology, on network television.

Ted Koppel struck the preferred
note of caution on November 2 when introducing his Nightline audience to
Arundhati Roy, an Indian novelist and a critic of the American bombing of
Afghanistan:

``Some of you, many of you, are not
going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen. But if you do,
you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange
packages.''

Most of the other security guards
deciding what could and could not be seen on camera explained the absence of
talking heads critical of the American ``War on Terrorism'' by saying that they
couldn't find any credible experts inclined to make an argument both seditious
and absurd. Thus Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC, telling a reporter from the
New York Times that apart from the raving of a few Hollywood celebrities there
wasn't enough dissent in the country ``to warrant coverage.'' Or Peter Beinart,
editor of The New Republic, outraged by the noise of protest in the
streets:

``This nation is now at war. And in
such an environment, domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior
statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides.''

In other words, as President Bush
had become fond of saying to United Nations ambassadors and foreign heads of
state, ``Either you are with us, or you're with the
terrorists.''

As a means of quieting the
distemper of the press, nothing works as well as the anodyne of war. Caught up
in the memory of a tale told by Homer or Rudyard Kipling, the keepers of the
nation's conscience gladly smother the peepings of dissent and quickly learn to
stuff a sock into the mouth of an impiety. Show them a cruise missile or a map,
and they become more ferocious than the generals. The scouts for the Sunday talk
shows might have found it difficult to recruit skeptics, but they didn't have
any trouble enlisting fuglemen to blow the trumpets of imperial advance--Tom
Brokaw, impatiently wanting to know why the Army wasn't deploying ground troops,
``in division-size force'' somewhere south of Kabul; Dick Morris on Fox News,
urging the Pentagon to boldly extend Civilization's War Against Barbarism by
occupying Libya and invading Iraq.

The eagerness to enlarge the
theater of military operations--a strategy endorsed not only by the regimental
commanders at Fox News but also by Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, and Senator
John McCain--seemed as senseless as the elevation of Osama bin Laden to a world
figure on the scale of Fidel Castro or Charles de Gaulle, but by the end of
October I'd begun to understand that the heavily armored media commentary
fortified a broadcast studio and went well with flags, the rhetoric made of the
same red, white, and blue bunting that decorates the speeches of President
Bush--``We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the
world,'' ``We value the right to speak our minds,'' ``Our ultimate victory is
assured.'' The viewing audience isn't expected to know what the words mean;
we're supposed to listen to them in the way one listens to a military band
playing ``Stars and Stripes Forever'' on the Washington Mall, or to Ray Charles
singing ``God Bless America'' in a World Series baseball
park.

Language degraded into the currency
of propaganda doesn't lend itself to conversations about the future course of
the American political idea, and if in September I thought that the destruction
of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might teach us something about our
own history as well as furnishing us with an English translation of the Arabic
word for ``student,'' it was because I'd neglected to ask where the profit was
to be found in a cloud of black smoke rising from the ruin of lower Manhattan.
Where was the silver lining, and where the blessings in disguise? Qui bono?, the
oldest of the old maxims once learned in a high school Latin class. To what end,
and in whose interest, do we astonish the world with the magnificence of
``Operation Enduring Freedom''?

The attacks on the buildings in
Virginia and New York were abominable and unprovoked, inflicting an as yet
unspecified sum of damage and an as yet incalculable measure of grief, but, as
Sir Michael Howard recently remarked to a lecture audience in London,they didn't constitute an act of war. By
choosing to define them as such, we invested a gang of murderous criminals with
the sovereignty of a nation-state (or, better yet, with the authority of a
world-encircling religion) and declared war on both an unknown enemy and an
abstract noun. Like an Arab jihad against capitalism, the American jihad against
terrorism cannot be won or lost; nor does it ever end. We might as well be
sending the 101st Airborne Division to conquer lust, annihilate greed, capture
the sin of pride. Howard regards the careless use of language as ``a very
natural but terrible and irrevocable error.'' If so, it is an error that works
to the advantage of the American political, military, and industrial interests
that prefer the oligarchic and corporatist forms of government to those of a
democracy.

Absent the excitements of a foreign
war, in what domestic political accident might we not have lost the wooden
figurehead of President George Bush? Six months ago we were looking at a man so
obviously in the service of the plutocracy that he could have been mistaken for
a lawn jockey in the parking lot of a Houston golf club or a prize fish mounted
on the wall of a Jacksonville bank. Having signed the law awarding $1.4 trillion
of tax relief to the country's richest individuals, he'd reimbursed the people
who had paid his ticket to the White House, but the smiling pose of
``compassionate conservatism'' was becoming hard to hold amidst the gradual
recognition of both its fraudulence and its rigidity. The economy was in
trouble, the Senate had lost its Republican majority, the President's approval
ratings were sliding into recession, and too many people still were wondering
about the sleights-of-hand that won the electoral vote in Florida. All in all,
not a promising outlook for a politician who had been told, and so believed,
that the running of a government was no different than the management of a
corporation.

On September 11, like Pinocchio
brushed with the good fairy's wand on old Gepetto's shelf of toys, the wooden
figurehead turned into flesh and blood. A great leader had been born, within a
month compared (by David Broder in the Washington Post) to Abraham Lincoln.
Suddenly we were looking at a man resplendent on the gilded throne of power, his
cliched speeches revealed as ``Churchillian'' in the bright new morning of a war
that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld guessed might last as long as forty
years.

Which was, of course, good news for
the defense industries and the military establishment. The Senate wasn't slow to
take the point, voting, unanimously and without debate on October 2, to fund a
$60 billion missile-defense system that to the best of nearly everybody's
knowledge can't hit its celestial targets and offers no defense against the
deadly weapons (smallpox virus, dynamite stuffed into a barrel of nuclear waste,
etc.) likely to be delivered in rented trucks. But why bother with cowardly and
disloyal argument? The nation is at war; civilization trembles in the balance,
and what true American stoops to haggle over the price of
freedom?

If the Senate cannot bring itself
to question a proposition as false as the missile-defense system, then what may
we not expect in the months of crisis yet to come? The Navy will want bigger
aircraft carriers, the Air Force another four hundred planes, the Army a set of
tanks equipped with electronics so sophisticated that they can set up the
targeting coordinates for each of the Koran's ninety-nine names for
God.

Senator Carl Levin (D., Mich.),
chairman of the Armed Services Committee, attributed the lack of debate about
the missiles to the need for ``unity'' when America was under siege; similar
flows of sentiment stifled the asking of rude questions about the war's
long-term aims and short-term costs. The Democratic members in both houses of
the Congress as silent as the chairs; no memorable speech or hint of eloquence;
nothing but an obedient show of hands and the hushed thumping of rubber
stamps.

Addressing a joint session of
Congress on the evening of September 20 the President congratulated the
assembled politicians for their bravery in a time of trouble, thanking them
``for what you have already done, and for what we will do together.''
Fortunately for the friends of good government, the patriotic news media have
quarantined the tone of irony for the duration of the campaign against the
world's ``evildoers''; otherwise the President's speech might have evoked not
only a round of brisk applause but also a gust of appreciative laughter. What
the Congress had been doing (in concert with the White House and the federal
regulatory agencies and brazen with the pretense of assisting the war effort)
was looting the country's public interest on behalf of its
well-

placed
private interests--the Interior Department relieved of its power to veto mining
projects on public lands; the pharmaceutical companies negotiating the right to
sell their drugs at the customary high prices in the event of a biological or
biochemical catastrophe; the insurance industry collectively seeking a $10
billion deductible; best of all, the economic ``stimulus package'' passed on
October 24 by the House of Representatives in the amount of $101 billion, the
bulk of the stimulant administered to wealthy individuals and
corporations.

Asked about the apparent
senselessness of the repeal of the corporate alternative minimum tax, Dick Armey
(R., Tex.), the House majority leader, justified the gifts ($1.4 billion to
I.B.M., $833 million to G.M., $671 million to G.E., etc.) by saying, ``This
country is in the middle of a war. Now is not the time to provoke spending
confrontations with our Commander-in-Chief.'' In answer to a related question as
to why the $15 billion soothing of economic wounds suffered by the airline
industry didn't allot any money, none whatsoever, to the 150,000 airline workers
who had lost their jobs in September, Armey observed that any help extended to
such people ``is not commensurate with the American
spirit.''

Who but a decadent Arab could have
thought otherwise?

Like Senator Levin, Congressman Armey
understood that in time of war the United States can't afford the distraction of
petty domestic politics. The promise of prescription-drug benefits for the
elderly will have to wait; so will nearly everything else that most people
associate with the words ``national security''--repair of the nation's roads and
schools and the prospect of decent health care for the 43 million citizens who
can't afford to buy it at the going rate.

The country's corporate overlords
don't associate the phrase ``national security'' with the health and well-being
of the American public; they define the term as a means of acquiring wealth and
as a reason for directing the country's diplomacy toward policies that return a
handsome profit--the bombing of caves in the Hindu Kush preferred to the
building of houses in St. Louis or Detroit. The work goes more smoothly when
conducted in an atmosphere of constant dread, and how better to magnify that
dread than by declaring a war against terrorism? Enemies on every hand and all
of them unseen; nothing safe, not even a postcard from a maiden aunt. Happy to
be of service and proud to protect the American people not only from bearded
strangers but also from themselves, the Congress in September hurried to the
task of forging legal shackles and restraints, also to the broadening of the
government's police powers and the further destruction of the Bill of Rights. By
the end of October the President had signed the USA PATRIOT Act, 342 pages of
small print that hardly anybody in the Senate or the House of Representatives
took the trouble to read but which nevertheless permitted the attorney general
to expand telephone and Internet surveillance, extend the reach of wiretaps,
open financial and medical records to searches for suspicious behavior and
criminal intent. Two weeks later he signed an emergency order (conceding that it
set aside ``the principles of law and the rules of evidence'') allowing him to
remand to a military tribunal any foreign national about whom he had ``reason to
believe'' a rumor of cohabitation with a terrorist organization, a nihilist
author, or an anarchist idea. The F.B.I. in the meantime was rounding up legal
immigrants of Middle Eastern descent (5,000 of them as of November 15) to
inquire about their connections to Saladin and the Third Crusade. Although the
corporatist distaste for the Constitution is nothing new (cf., the deliberate
weakening of the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments over the last twenty
years), the guarantee of an always present danger extends the government's
prerogative to enforce whatever rule of law happens to prove convenient to the
rule of money.

On November 11 in Atlanta, standing
in front of a photomontage of heroic New York City firemen, President Bush told
his audience that the nation ``faces a threat to our freedoms, and the stakes
could not be higher.'' What he said was true, but not in the way that he
intended. We have more to fear from the fatwas issued in Washington than from
those drifting across the deserts of Central Asia. The agents of Al Qaeda might
wreck our buildings and disrupt our commerce, maybe even manage to kill a number
of our fellow citizens, but we do ourselves far greater harm if we pawn our
civil rights and consign the safekeeping of our liberties to Mullah John
Ashcroft and the mujahedeen in the hospitality tents of American
crusade.